Free VPN "Hotspot Shield" Bandwith Fix Tutorial

Hotspot Shield is essentially a free private secure VPN tunnel service that routes through a US server with USA location IP address. And thus, it has been used not only for security unencrypted wireless connection connected to public WiFi access point, but also been used as a tool to access websites restricted only to visitors from United States, or as a ‘proxy’ to surf anonymously or download shared files from RapidShare, MegaUpload, etc.

Unfortunately, Hotspot Shield now limit the free bandwidth usage (data that been transmitted and tunneled through AnchorFree VPN server) to paltry 5GB over a rolling 30 days period.

Hotspot Shield is quite simple to use. Just download Hotspot Shield (less than 1MB) and install. You can either run “Hotspot Shield Launch” shortcut from desktop or start menu and you’ll notice a shield icon appear at your tray. Your default web browser will open up Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree page. To connect to Hotspot Shield VPN server, you can either right click the tray icon and select Connect or click the big “Run Hotspot Shield” button at the webpage. When you’re connected, you’ll see a similar page like the image below.

Hotspot Shield service is totally free. If you wonder how can they run their servers to provide you with such service, well, they are funded by advertisements and that can get annoying.To disable that install ADBLOCK PlUS on Firefox.

Now to the point,
When the bandwidth limit exceeded, user may get one of the following error messages when attempting to connect to Hotspot Shield VPN server:

State: Disconnected (Auth Failure)

State: Disconnected (Bandwidth Exceeded)

State: Daemon Start Error

State: TCP Connect Wait

Hotspot Shield does not require user accounts which means that they must have different means to track user bandwidth.The Mac address is being used by Hotspot Shield to keep track of the bandwidth usage.The only thing left to do would be to change the MAC address to another one which would basically mean that the counter would be reset to 0 again and that the user could use another 5 Gigabytes with Hotspot Shield.

Now i will not write how to change Mac address sine we have here alredy a good tutorial about that:

Hotspot Shield is a easy and free way to surf anonymously trough web,web surfing speed is not bad,it's only about 20% slower then your real speed,much better then public proxy's ,only downloading is little to slow about 30-100 kB/s.

Who Said Thanks:

Thanks for the info. I used to have HSS installed in my PC after finding out it was my ISP that was shaping P2P traffic, rather than slow downloads from public trackers. It worked very well and I could reach decent speeds with it, but it NATs you, and its IPs are banned from a lot of private trackers and eD2k servers (most likely for being an "anonymizer").

I stumbled upon the "Auth Failure" error one day, and had to work around it myself v0.936 didn't have this issue at all, but they changed their server IP ranges quite recently, so that using that version results on a "you're using an old version. Upgrade!" sort of message if you try to surf.

Tip: all the new server IPs resolve to hss.anchorfree.net, so commenting (put a # behind them) all lines starting with remote in v0.936's config file and adding this one:

Code:

remote hss.anchorfree.net 8044

should work - but I haven't tried it.

The program itself is based on a custom version of OpenVPN, so if you play around with registry keys and OVPN-GUI, you should be able to use it without the Web UI or that shield tray icon.

This is a great way to bypass geographical restrictions and enter sites such as Hulu or Pandora!

You can now safely turn off your computer.
If you want to restart your computer, press CTRL+ALT+DEL.
_

Who Said Thanks:

hmm i copied some files from Hotspot Shield folders "driver","bin" and "config" to same folders in OpenVPN.In Hotspot "bin" folder i just left openvpntray.exe and tapinstall.exe all other just copy to openvpn "bin" folder.and you need to rename config.hvpn to config.ovpn,just replace letter h with o.run openVPN ,right click on tray icon ,config,connect.there will be no more web interface and ads

If you can browse while Hotspot Shield is running , then most likely the tracker is blocking HSS IPs. (There's nothing you can do about this. It may also be the opposite, HSS blocking trackers to save bandwidth, I haven't used this in a long time)

You can now safely turn off your computer.
If you want to restart your computer, press CTRL+ALT+DEL.
_

@anon, please can you give me the old Version of Hotspot shield and the Registry key's, for Hotspot not will be STOP and ask for "Download the new Version" Ads and Blocks, from Hotspot shield not remove on my PC with this....